Thank you for reading our first issue. The articles from our first issue, as well as all those following, can be found online at reedthegrail.com.

The snow made it feel like a real winter here in Portland. Students adapted their attire, huddled for warmth, and reflected on the changing environment.

One semester in, Brendan Sorrell discusses the reception of the new Performing Arts Building with students and faculty who have intimately interacted with their own new space. Agreed on the beauty and relative utility of the new space, they voice their fears about the purpose of the PAB and the effect of its presence.

News & Features

Before the Performing Arts Building (PAB) was constructed, the Music Department had been largely in Prexy, the Theatre Department in the old building in the canyon, and the Dance Department found places to practice in the gym. The new spaces are breathtaking, but the unification of the performing arts in one building should be seen as the greater achievement. As you walk through the atrium and see a class using the steps for a staged reading, past the Studio Theatre and Performance Lab being used for various dance and theatre events, and look through the large windows of the dance studio at a class’s rehearsal until they all start looking at you and you continue on your way — all while some piano music drifts through the entire building from the student practice spaces.

Graceful Grousings

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Miss Lonely Hearts

I have a huge crush on this boy in my Hum conference and I just don’t know what to do. He always wears the best flannels and the most perfectly beat up jeans and boots and no one knows how to talk about Plato’s Republic or the cloudiness of reality in Herodotus’ Histories like he does. What should I do? Should I slip a Sappho poem in his mail stop? Or maybe drop a hint about meeting sometime to talk about those star-crossed lovers, Helen and Paris?

Please respond ASAP,

Lovestruck in Hum Conference.

De Sastre

Last week’s winter wonderland left some Reedies wondering what to wear. Not Sasha Jones ‘16, inspired by her Bordeaux socks, she coordinated her lips and sweater to match her cozy fashionable feet. Craving some color? Check out our blog, dosdesastres.blogspot.com for the full color photo of Sasha and another Reedie dressed stylishly for the cold!

Music Reviews

Mossy stones, wax-covered candlesticks, a harvest moon. These are but a few of the images the acoustic folk album Bad Debt conjures upon listening. When it reaches its final note, it is about God and love. In the artist’s own words, which are far superior to any rock criticism about the album, “the record is about my God: that is, whether I have one, and whether there is a place for me in this world. I don’t go to church, and I am not saved. I can party too.”

Burn After Reading

Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, NW returns to the streets of NW London. This is the setting of her first novel and where she has lived most of her life, which she populates with characters whose colloquial British English differs greatly from her prose in diction, but not in rhythm. Her most stylistically ambitious novel, NW makes widespread use of unattributed dialogue and free, indirect speech to make the similarities in her prose more apparent. As self-described “sentimental humanist”, she does not shy away from the fact that she was born to these streets herself, not trying to hide her personal connection.